JSR Group chooses Contrac for infrastructure upgrade

Background

When John Rymer founded JSR Farms Limited in 1958, he established some important business principles. He also set out a simple formula that has continued to provide a focus for the group’s activities and growth – people, pigs, peas and potatoes.

Today JSR is one of the largest family-owned farming companies in the UK. It has 2 operational companies; JSR Genetics Ltd – a highly successful international pig genetics company and JSR Farms Ltd – an integrated arable business demonstrating sustainable farming.

The Challenge

An ageing virtualised estate and onsite backup systems, were becoming costly to maintain. The onsite backup solution, posed a business risk in the event of a Disaster Recovery situation.

In addition to the old equipement, JSR had also stipulated that any work carried out had to have minimal disruption to the workforce and no loss of data.

The Solution

Contrac’s solution was to migrate the existing environment into a hyper converged private cloud solution. We also advised regarding the upgrade for the backup solution, to include full off-site replication, and Disaster Recovery capabilities.

Contrac ran an analysis on the existing IT core, which enabled the correct sizing of the new infrastructure. After consulting with the client, it was agreed that a Dell PowerEdge VRTX chassis, together with a pair of Dell M630 blade servers as the new hosts, would provide a solid backbone for the environment. We then repurposed the old production hosts and SAN for the off-site backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions, utilising Veeam software.

By utilising VMWare and Veeam’s toolset, the VMs were migrated to the new infrastructure without interruption to the business.

The Outcome

The solution resulted in a new streamlined environment with no interruption or downtime to the business, within budget and on time. Significant performance improvements we’re gained on VM speed, and a reduction in backup times from 4 hours to 45 minutes was secured.